Bury me, my Love Switch review - "Beautiful game, wrong platform"

Bury me, my Love was one of the biggest narrative games of 2017, and one that we rather stupidly overlooked at the time - but thanks to a re-release on Switch, we're able to fix that mistake.

And if you missed it first time around too, you need to rectify that right now. It's a beautifully told, heart-breaking tale of a Syrian woman trying to escape her country and facing prejudice and hardship at almost every turn, all while you offer advice through a phone screen.

Its implementation on Switch is a little sloppy, and concessions have had to be made to accommodate the new platform, but the story within is so affecting that you'd be a fool to miss it.

Walk on

Bury me, my Love plays out in text conversations between yourself, Majd, and your wife, Nour, as she tries to get the hell of out Syria and into Europe by any means necessary.

You can't do anything directly, instead offering your opinions and advice on what route Nour should take next. Should she save money but go to the wrong place? Should she try to cross into Europe on a tiny boat over-filled with fellow refugees? Can she trust the people she meets? It's up to you to help her decide.

The conversations are fantastically realised. Just because you offer your opinion doesn't mean Nour will listen - sometimes you can fruitlessly try to dissuade her from a path, only to have her totally ignore you and do her own thing.

Your interactions are also surprisingly realistic. You don't always have to choose a lengthy dialogue option to progress the story, and can instead opt to send an appropriate emoji to reflect your feelings, or avoid saying something Nour might find upsetting.

No matter how you respond or what Nour does, each step of the route is harrowing and deeply affecting. This is not a happy game by any stretch of the imagination, and any moments of levity are swiftly crushed by the reality of the situation.

Some of the things Nour experiences on her journey are incredibly upsetting, and knowing that these are things which happened to real people makes it all the worse. Seriously, unless you have a strong stomach, you might want to get this a miss.

It gets worse when you reach one of the game's endings. Each one is presented with a short voice clip, a key differentiation between the rest of the game which helps you know you're at journey's end.

But these can range from slightly depressing to absolutely soul-destroying. I don't ever want to hear a woman sobbing "I love you" down the phone to me as her ship capsizes ever again.

Shaky footing

While the tale told may be beautiful and emotionally-charged, its delivery falters slightly on Switch, largely due to the changes made specifically for the platform.

On the mobile release, conversations with Nour took place in real-time - like the equally-brilliant Lifeline, you had to wait a set amount of time in the real-world to further the plot and talk to Nour at key junctions in her story.

On Switch, this is thrown out entirely. Instead, at the end of each conversation, time jumps forward to the next part of your chat.

This does a few things. First of all, it makes each journey much, much shorter. You can see several endings in a few hours instead of a few weeks, offering you a lot more of the story and exchanges that other players may never have seen.

However, the time-skip sometimes crops up to fast-forward a couple of minutes, or sometimes just one minute, which completely disrupts the flow of the conversation and barely makes sense given how much time is passing.

Because you're barrelling through the game, you'll start to come across paths you've seen before at an alarming rate, showing off just how little some of your choices actually matter. It's not surprising, but it is a bit of an immersion-breaker.

There's no checkpoint system either, so if you make a few too many wrong choices and Nour ends up in a particularly nasty ending, you have to start at the beginning and wind your way through hundreds of lines of dialogue before you can try to change things.

Admittedly, this does serve as a way of indicating that ultimately there are no "good" or "bad" paths, just things that happen to a person. But from a mechanical point of view, and combined with the other gripes, it doesn't make for the best experience.

There are other faults. The text in handheld mode is tiny, even with the font whacked up to the highest it goes. You can rotate the screen to look more like a phone, but then the button layouts become slightly more confusing if you have Joy-Cons inserted on your Switch.

Touch screen play is available, but it vanishes if you press a button on a Joy-Con and never seems to come back. And at least one dialogue path is completely broken - the game consistently crashed out completely after making a certain choice late in the game.

The hardest step

Yet, despite all this, you simply must play Bury me, my Love - if you think you can handle it emotionally.

It's magnificently written, capturing both the harsh realities of war and the weirdness that is modern textual communication. It feels totally real thanks to a mixture of light-hearted humour and the atrocities you'll face. And you might even learn something about one of the biggest humanitarian crises of the 21st century.

But the Switch port needs some work doing to it. The time-skip feature needs better implementation, major crashes need sorting, and it would be nice to be able to somehow experience the game the way it was intended to be played, only on a different platform.

If you want the fullest experience, check it out on mobile instead. But whichever way you plan on playing it, you really should try Bury me, my Love. There's a reason it won so many awards - it's beautiful.

Bury Me, My Love

Bury me, my Love is stunningly beautiful and emotionally challenging, but its Switch port needs some fine-tuning to match its story-telling prowess